Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday November 26, 2011 @10:30AM
from the with-liberty-and-strip-searches-for-all dept.

PolygamousRanchKid writes with this quote from CNN about the future of airport security:
"Earlier this year, the International Air Transport Association demonstrated its vision for the 'checkpoint of the future' — a series of neon-lit tunnels, each equipped with an array of eye-scanners, x-ray machines, and metal and liquid detectors. ... 'Known Travelers,' (those who have completed background checks with government authorities) for instance, will cruise through the light blue security corridor with little more than an ID check, while those guided through the yellow 'Enhanced' corridor will be subjected to an array of iris scans and sensitive contraband detectors. ... Feeling guilty? Got something to hide? A team of UK-based researchers claim to have developed a thermal lie-detection camera that can automatically spot a burning conscience. ... Professor Byeong-chun Lee, who established his reputation in 2005 as the driving force behind the world's first ever dog clone, has bought a new breed of super-sniffers to South Korea's Incheon Airport. They may look like an ordinary pack of golden Labrador Retrievers, but these dogs are all genetically identical to 'Chase,' a dog whose legendary snout kept him top of Incheon's drug-detection rankings right up until his retirement in 2007."

Looks too efficient for TSA, their dream is a luggage shredder instead of a x-ray scanner, and a wipeout style obstacle course(that you have to run naked, with live streams to the public internet filming it all) with blaring sirens and powertripping functionaries with bullwhips lining the course to drive the herds onwards.
Contracted at a cost of $12 billions, annually.

I'm simply not going to them any more. Society has turned them into a manifestation of cowardice and the very worst possible kind of decision-making. I won't support the industry any longer, at least insofar as I have a choice (I'm referring here to the use of my taxes, something out of my control.)

I feel bad for those of you who must fly, I really do. All the jokes we used to make about the nazi's and the soviets and "papers, please", have come home to roost.

I wonder how much longer we'll be free to drive without being subjected to this kind of thing?

It's even worse than the "papers, please" that we all know and fear. The TSA goons don't even know what they are looking at. I told one at Dulles Airport that my Common Access Card was in my wallet so I wasn't going to just hand my wallet over to him. He just gave me a blank stare for a second and then said, "What do you mean you won't give me your wallet?"I pulled out my CAC and explained what it was to him and why I just couldn't hand it over. In order to get through the checkpoint, I gave him my wallet and CAC after demanding that another TSA agent observe him while he had it. Yes, it's wasn't a win over the TSA, but at least two of those bureaucrats know what a Common Access Card is now.

I cant wait for the first government worker security clearance/pay-grade fights begin at these checkpoints.

See what happens when someone who works in another form of government gets harassed or someone they are with gets the treatment by TSA. "I've got a GS something something security clearance, I fucking have a paygrade 10x what you make you Fucking TSA overpaid rental cop!" When a TSA supervisor arrives, the same pissed off government employee takes the next TSA agent to task because the

Equating the TSA to the "papers, please" mentality of the Nazis and the USSR is doing a great disservice to all three. I'm all for hyperbole, indeed it's the absolute best, but your comparison is incredibly cheap.

Looks too efficient for TSA, their dream is a luggage shredder instead of a x-ray scanner, and a wipeout style obstacle course(that you have to run naked, with live streams to the public internet filming it all) with blaring sirens and powertripping functionaries with bullwhips lining the course to drive the herds onwards.

On Monday Bob gets a promotion, with a brand new uniform with a designer jacket, cooler boots and shades, and just loaded with ribbons and medals and bangles and crap, and of course there are all kinds of speeches and celebration. Then Tuesday and Wednesday Bob does some security training which would, naturally, include a reflexive fire course, advanced driver's course, and a computer hacking course. Bob

In the United States, the Transport Security Administration (TSA) is not just relying on fancy gadgets and genetically enhanced nostrils to improve security: it's turning to good old-fashioned human instinct.

Behavioural Detection Officers (BDOs) have been trained to engage passengers in casual conversation in an effort to weed out suspicious behavior.

There is no word if the TSA plans to clone BDOs, like Korean Sniffer Dogs . ..

Human cloning is banned. Expect the new batch of cloned TSA agents in approximately fifteen years.

Well, the obvious solution to this is to hybridize a TSA agent with the super nosed Labrador Retriever clone. You get the perfect employee - works for treats and an occasional pat on the head, can sniff out anything from marijuana to C4, lives about 10 years so no long term Social Security / Medicare costs and is one hell of a lot cuter than the vast majority of current TSA agents.

Or, put another way, except for most terrorists. After all, if they had even a modicum of guilt, they wouldn't commit such atrocities. Therefore, without even looking at this technology, we can fairly definitively state that it cannot possibly be effective at preventing terrorist attacks of any sort.

That won't stop the TSA from spending billions of dollars to buy them and install them in airports across the country, though, and this is why our government is going broke. Want to shave of 8.1 billion dolla

I'll put that right there with my perpetual motion machine. Sure you can detect ir, and lying for some people may cause a discernable alteration, but I'd bet it's nothing compared to the standard variations of the vast sea of inherited characteristics of humanity, combined with the multiple and growing stress factors involved in airport 'security' these days. At best that system could probably only give a highly trained examiner in laboratory conditions a 2 or 3% improvement over random chance at detectin

Herded, you mean. Why do you people continue to put up with this crap? And don't try to tell me it's only in the USA. Europe was doing intrusive "screening" long before the USA started: we used to be criticised by Europeans for having "lax security" because we allowed people to get on airplanes without first proving that they were not armed criminals.

Because when even many liberals don't see what's wrong with it those of us that do end up with no representation. I'm going to be flying again in a couple months and I'm going to take a plane out of Canada because I'm not interested in putting up with that unconstitutional crap.

Which liberals would you be referring to? The majority of politicians in the United States are conservatives, with varying degrees of conservatism. Long before the TSA, so-called "liberals" in the United States government so no problem with our prison population or the enormous power that the law enforcement agencies in this country have amassed. You already have no representation -- when will you start voting third party or perhaps running your own campaign?

Most of those I know. They kvetch about abuses but they can't see that the entire program is fundamentally wrong.

> You already have no representation...

I am, unfortunately, in a very small minority. Whlle many (though still a minority) dislike TSA and friends they don't seem to consider it important enough to have much effect on their votes or their behavior. They also would never, ever vote for a Republican and so the Republicans write them off while the

European airports don't do any of this shit, and in fact just banned the x-ray machines. And yet, they could still probably criticize American airports for "lax security" because all of this is just security theater and does fuck all to actually secure the flight.

I should say "didn't do any of this shit before American flights started requiring all incoming flights to do it" because there is a lot of crap one has to go through now. My local airport just has a separate terminal specifically for American and Israeli flights so they can keep the bullshit to a minimum for passengers flying to less paranoid destinations.

Herded, you mean. Why do you people continue to put up with this crap? And don't try to tell me it's only in the USA. Europe was doing intrusive "screening" long before the USA started: we used to be criticised by Europeans for having "lax security" because we allowed people to get on airplanes without first proving that they were not armed criminals.

Europe has its own problems, to simplify things (hey, isn't that what discussing on Internet is for?) historically it has been that in Europe, you have passports, are required to have a social security number and uniquely identified and once you are cleared you are free to travel. See the Schengen treaty. This of course involves all kinds of nasty stuff of information exchange between authorities but it has been quite non-intrusive - if you have a passport from Schengen country and are not on Interpol/Europ

According to TFA, thermal-lie detection, the dog clone, the bluetooth passenger tracking and the behavioral detection officers are in no way linked to IATA's vision of the checkpoint of the future. They are just independent developments in transport security but nonetheless irrelevant to IATA.

For everybody's reference IATA is owned and funded by private airline companies. They are not government funded in any way IATA's website [iata.org]

If they cannot screen everyone then the screening is meaningless. Security only works if every threat is stopped. Think of it this way, would you buy an oven mitt that said on the label it will keep your hand from getting burned 90% of the time?

Screening is already meaningless. Anyone who knows Bayes' theorem can figure that one out. The prescreening is simply a consequence of the security organizations finding out that they do have to respect reality to some extent: people won't put up with it otherwise.

Agreed, it's a matter of time before someone's ID gets swiped and the imposter gets waved through with contraband. Of course, the TSA will deny it's their fault for such a gaping hole and try prosecuting the poor sap whose ID got stolen.

Heck, with such a system I'm sure the terrorists will target TSA employees to steal their ID.

Yeah just put your money where your mouth is and charter a flight. The TSA is just for the nobodies the poor and the soon to be ex-middle class, getting you used to your new lifestyle where random strip searches for you and your family are the norm. Where even giving a dirty look to your betters, the rich and greedy, will earn you and your family extended discomfort and humiliation, with repeated strip searches and body probes in your own home.

If I didn't know any better, it seems like the media (still) buys into this idea of intense paranoia it is being sold to by government and private industry. It reminds people that there might be a terrorist on their plane. If there's no security the plane will blow up and you'll die. If there's 1000x more security, no terrorist, but the plane might still crash. Or, I'm willing to bet, 99.999999999% of the time you'll land safe and sound.

This whole article sounds to me like profiteering.

will cruise through the light blue security corridor with little more than an ID check, while those guided through the yellow 'Enhanced' corridor will be subjected to an array of iris scans and sensitive contraband detectors.... Feeling guilty? Got something to hide? A team of UK-based researchers claim to have developed a thermal lie-detection camera

"the world's first ever dog clone, has bought a new breed of super-sniffers"

Hmmmm.... there;s 3 new growth industries right there. Iris scan, dector, the camera. These enchanced corridors will be built by some government contractor on a no-bid contract. Training these new dogs - the DEA and company will ask for budget increases.

I don't live in the US. If you guys ever implement this, I'm staying out of the US. I'm not going to fly to a country where I have to board an American plane and go through DHS inspection.

If our food, our homes and our cars were to go through this much scrutiny - are the airplanes REALLY checked very often? - then we'd be a lot safer. This is BS and everyone here knows it.

We know security is driven by profits, can we have liberties driven by profits?

For example, laptops are allowed on planes for business people. What can we learn from this?I think we can learn that people with the cash will be able to bypass all the security clearing. Certainly we can already do this by private chartering a plane. Perhaps we can look into lowering the cash needing to do so, so that eventually only the very poor have to undergo various scans.

I think this perfectly show the current level of society and human thinking in modern media hype driven society. Bottom low.
To blow up a bunch of persons it just take a bunch of persons... no plane, no train... no anything. Wake up... 'terrorists' will just laugh
at our self-inflicted useless and sick expensive 'measures'...And rich pigs with hands into 'security' business and such bullshit will just get richer....
When too much will be too much...I hope it won't be too late as well.

They don't care since it's all theater anyway. Why else have all the visible paraphernalia? Obscure security mechanisms, ala casinos, would be more effective if one wanted actual security.

The intent was to convince people to fly again after 9/11. So they made it as in your face as possible. The people didn't come back in the numbers which flew before, so they've been tweaking the process since then, both to increase usage and to combat new scares like shoe bombers and underwear bombers. They're lost. They don't know how to fix the problem and continue to make it worse.

"International Air Transport Association demonstrated its vision for the 'checkpoint of the future' â" a series of neon-lit tunnels, each equipped with an array of eye-scanners, x-ray machines, and metal and liquid detectors."

Bomb in the lineup before you get to the neon tunnel.

"Feeling guilty? Got something to hide? A team of UK-based researchers claim to have developed a thermal lie-detection camera that can automatically spot a burning conscience."

Guilty? Hell no, I'm going to be going to Heaven as a beloved martyr in about five minutes!

So the terrorists will just divert to, what -- football stadiums, railway bridges, turnpikes.Are there any, btw. -- terrorists I mean.Or is this meant to control the population at large maybe.Just asking.

Targets are easy, and there is no viable way to protect them all. Anyone who's played a lot of the in depth strategy games would know that. For example, this last black friday would make a fantastic terrorist targeting opportunity. I can't see that kind of 'security' garbage being implemented at every major store/sale in the country, can you. Of course, you could also target a public pool during a hot summer, that'll get a couple hundred people easy.For that matter, why wait till conditions are good, make

From what i can tell from the view of someone outside the USA who despite so many reasons to come visit... is utterly appalled at how i will be treated crossing the border. The TSA dont seem to make any decisions. It seems to all be set by the moronic higher ups in your government.

Seriously though, I don't think this is a power grab. More likely its just bureaucracy gone mad. TSA will be blamed if there are ANY terrorist incidents on aircraft so they have an incentive to do everything they can think of. In addition, the more money they spend, the larger their bureaucracy grows, and the more important its members feel, so by Parkinson's law they will tend to grow.

So, if this is a new, "functional" lie detector, can it be fooled in the similar ways as polygraph, by clenching one's ass? I can already see all the stiff-looking people marching through the checkpoint, and suddenly relaxing when relevant part of check starts.

(Reality is, polygraph and other lie detectors work only as well as the person operating them measures against one being interrogated).

There should be three paths, one for trusted, verified passengers (green), one for people that's 'probably' trusted (orange) and one for everybody else (red).

The green path requires only a simple ID check and a standard metal scanner (portal type). If it beeps a manual scan is conducted with a wand, just like in the pre-9/11 days. Most ordinary civilized people qualify for this.

The orange path has the above plus an enhanced ID check (like green but slower). People with certain backgrounds fits here.

The thermal-imaging camera captures variations in facial temperature in response to questioning. "When someone is making something up on the spot, brain activity usually changes and you can detect this through the thermal camera," said professor Hassan Ugail, who leads the research.

Dang, i guess the "bad" people will have to just work out stories ahead of time, so they always have an answer ready.